Last year, Intel claimed that its Meteor Lake processors, known as Core Ultra, represented the company’s biggest architectural shift in 40 years. But Intel hasn’t settled down since: Today, it revealed how Lunar Lake, its next generation of laptop chips coming this fall, will revolutionize the model again.
Faced with the existential threat from Arm and the opportunity of AI PCs, Intel has apparently abandoned its famous tick-tock rhythm in favor of a new system-on-a-chip design that not only triples the size of its AI but also quadruples performance. times the accelerator, but promises 14% better CPU performance, 50% better graphics performance, and 60% longer battery life than last year’s model at the same clock speed.
“This is x86 functionality you’ve never seen before,” said Rob Hallock, Intel’s technical marketer. He said Intel tweaked every part of the chip to achieve this. He said it would also “definitely” beat Qualcomm.
What’s the biggest change? If you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, it won’t have a separate memory stick or chip! Lunar Lake now has 16 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory built into the package, with no way to connect more RAM. According to Intel, this change can reduce the power consumption of transmitting data through the system by approximately 40%. For those who need more memory, Hallock said laptops will have a separate Arrow Lake architecture later this year.
After several hours of poring over slides and presentations, plus a quick chat with Hallock, here’s everything I just learned.
8 cores, no hyperthreading
Last year’s Meteor Lake included a crazy new “3D Performance Hybrid Architecture” load Performance (P), efficiency (E), and even a pair of new low-power (LP-E) cores on separate blocks Known as the “Low Power Island”.
The island is designed like a smartphone and, for a first time for Intel, has its own Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display controller, memory and low-power CPU cores. The idea: In theory, unless you’re performing larger tasks, you could save battery life by not heating up other blocks and getting bigger cores.
But it didn’t work. Applications like Microsoft Teams end up heating up the entire chip. So, just a year later, Intel canceled the LP-E core in favor of a new 4 x 4 system. You can get up to four new “Lion Cove” P cores and four new “Skymont” E cores in Lunar Lake wafers. These E cores now run as fast as LP-E cores, consume one-third the power of LP-E cores, or scale to 2x or 4x the performance (single-threaded vs. multi-threaded).
Microsoft and Intel claim that with the new thread controller, Windows can now create “containment zones” that actually keep the “most realistic workloads” on the Skymont E cores.
“This is the key to Lunar Lake’s battery life: We can run more workloads on lower-power cores in a lower-power environment with fewer devices turned on,” said Intel researcher Stephen Robinson. Still giving you a great user experience.
Intel claims that Microsoft Teams uses 35% less power on Lunar Lake as a result of these changes, although Intel says it hasn’t been able to translate that into my work time yet.
Likewise, Intel eventually eliminated Hyper-Threading because SMT technology consumed more power and space than it was worth. Hallock admits that “adding more cores will increase the die area a little bit” compared to doubling the amount of circuitry required to make HT work, but says the E-cores are so compact and powerful that HT simply doesn’t make sense anymore. .
Higher performance everywhere
Speaking of powerful E cores, Intel’s Skymont has another surprise: this year’s E core is more powerful and more efficient than last year’s P core At typical laptop clock speeds, single-thread performance is improved by 20%. It just doesn’t scale to nearly gigahertz:
Meanwhile, four “Lion Cove” P cores provide a 14% performance boost, although Intel won’t provide clock speed numbers so we can make a true comparison. But overall, Hallock said, performance has “significantly improved from generation to generation” compared to last year.
When it comes to GPUs, Intel is even more confident: The company says its Xe2 GPUs offer 1.5x the graphics performance of Meteor Lake (in 3DMark Time Spy), while Meteor Lake itself is 2x the performance of the previous generation. It still has the same number of Xe cores and other functional units, but with various performance and efficiency improvements.
While all Lunar Lake chips are certainly not created equal, Intel says it won’t have to split its Xe laptop GPUs into two different versions to accommodate lower and higher wattages: Xe2 can now scale to light and A range of mid-range laptops by itself. Intel also said that in addition to the NPU, the GPU also provides 67 TOPS of AI performance.
Triple NPU
Meteor Lake didn’t really kick off the AI-powered laptop scene as Intel had hoped. In fact, you might say it left early adopters cold – their NPU’s AI acceleration was only 11.5 TOPS, well below Microsoft’s 40 TOPS claim for Copilot Plus PCs.
But the Lunar Lake chip triples the amount of NPU hardware, doubles the memory bandwidth, and increases the clock speed from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz, delivering up to 48 TOPS and an estimated 2 to 4 times the overall performance. .
Triple hardware Do It consumes more power, but Intel says it’s much faster: Lunar Lake’s 20 stable diffusion iterations take just 5.8 seconds, while Meteor Lake takes 20.9 seconds, while pulling 11.2 watts instead of the previous 9 watts.
Intel said its software partners are currently building 350 artificial intelligence features into PCs by 2025.
Something else that caught my attention or heard
- Lunar Lake now natively supports H.266 VVC video. Under “same quality”, the file size is an additional 10% smaller than AV1.
- You can integrate Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 into the chip, although it still requires a companion PCIe module for the physical radio and antenna connectors.
- Intel claims a 55% reduction in wireless wake-up time when waking up the machine.
- eDP 1.5 uses “panel replay” and other technologies to eliminate the need to draw the same image repeatedly on the screen, saving up to (emphasis on “up to”) 351mW of power consumption.
- Intel said there is a new dedicated partner security engine on the chip, “effectively a Microsoft Pluton” with its own processor, fuses and encryption parts.
- Lunar Lake’s onboard memory means motherboards can and will shrink in size—”there are some interesting design-winning decisions coming up,” Hallock said.
- Lunar Lake’s Compute Tile is indeed built on TSMC’s N3B processor, and the platform controller is TSMC’s N6, although Intel says that all design, assembly and packaging are completed by it.
- Intel says it can dynamically adjust RAM speed to reduce Wi-Fi interference.
- Intel says it can dynamically adjust the clock speed in 16.67MHz intervals (below 100MHz) to optimize performance.
- Every Lunar Lake system has two Thunderbolt 4 ports — “Make sure you have at least two Thunderbolt 4 ports on every Lunar Lake system you touch,” Hallock said.
- Like Qualcomm, Intel will sell a Mac Mini-like AI PC development kit later this year, which Intel says will be upgradeable to Panther Lake chips when it becomes available.
Intel said a wave of Lunar Lake laptops will be available later this year, launching with 80 different designs from 20 hardware partners, including all of the largest PC vendors except Microsoft, which has chosen to The Surface Laptop and Surface Pro use Qualcomm chips instead. All 80 designs should be available before the holidays this year, said Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel’s head of customer silicon.
